Note:
This is the second half of chapter four of a multi part series. You can find the series’ purpose and a table of contents here.
Who this specific piece is for, how to interpret it, and a recap of Ch 1-3 can be found in the first half here.
Preface:
Well, this piece ended up being much longer than I’d wanted it to be. But it’s complete.
It is broken up into three sections:
What To Do: Beginner Edition — How to set up the base requirements for successful relations with women.
What To Do: Intermediate Edition — How to determine what your goals with women are so you can devise an effective strategy.
What To Do: Advanced Edition — How to go about actually enacting a dating strategy.
This has definitely been the biggest project I have ever worked on, totaling over 60 hours of writing over 8 weeks. Overall, I’m not super happy with it, but that’s largely because I’ve just had so much time to stare at it and realize everything it’s missing. The Burgundy Pill definitely needs much more work, but I will probably be taking a break from it to focus on other projects for a while.
With that said: If you have questions or unique situations, feel free to DM or comment with them and I’ll probably answer them.
Hope you find it valuable. Onward.
What To Do: Beginner Edition
First, let’s start with the basics. Most of this section is standard Intro to The Red Pill steps. If you’ve fully integrated and used TRP for a few years, you probably know and have done this stuff. But given that there are plenty of men who perceive TRP as too toxic to even be worth diving in enough to figure out what is baby and what is bathwater, I include here the parts of “How To Women 2.0” (TRP) that are carried forward into “How to Women 3.0” (Burgundy Pill).
Note: these don’t necessarily have to happen in this order, but probably pretty close to it.
1. Become proficient at saying “No”.
If you can’t say “No” you not only will never get or keep any women—let alone high-quality ones—but you won’t ever get any power or freedom or control over anything at all.
When you say yes to something, you are implicitly saying no to everything else you could spend that time and energy on. And if you say yes to whatever anyone else asks for whenever they ask for it because you don’t want to upset them or be disliked or get rejected or whatever your reason is: you are a slave to slaves. And there is nothing worse than that.
The reality is that it’s impossible to not be constantly saying no. The only thing that’s actually changing is whether you are deciding what you’re saying No to, or you’re letting the people around you decide it.
Most agreeable men—those for whom “pro-social” thoughts and feelings come naturally—today are incapable of taking control of their “No” until A) they become overwhelmed at all the commitments they’ve taken on or B) become resentful at how much they have given, expecting reciprocity and never getting it (covert contracts), then getting angry, aggressive, and toxic.1
The latter is where “passive aggression”—“niceness” and then “explosion”—comes from. And passive aggression is the ultimate manifestation of slavery. Further, it is corrosive and toxic to relationships. Not only because it is unpredictable and miserable for you and others, but because most things people say they want or allude to are not only not important to you but they aren’t even important to them.
Most of the time someone asks for something (or has an emotional reaction that alludes to what they want) they don’t actually care that much. At absolute most, 1 out of 10 things people say they want they’d actually be willing to pay anything for (with time, money, energy, reciprocity, etc). And you jumping to meet them without any hesitation only means you waste 90% of your energy on things people would rather not get than reciprocate for. Meaning 90% of your energy might as well go in the trash.
And when you are spending all your time and energy on this infinite list of that which is “urgent but unimportant” you are prevented from ever having time for the rare-but-highly-important things that people actually really value, and thus which they would reciporicate time, energy, or money toward (which are pre-requisites to wealth, power, opportunity, and competence ie markers that are you useful to the human race which is a pre requisite to being attractive to women).
So unless you want to die a useless and resentful loser rejected not only by women but humanity as a whole, the first and most important thing you must do is take control of your “No”—to become capable of using it confidently, firmly, and toward your strategic objectives; rather than like a cowering animal spewing aggression, hostility, and bitchiness because it has again been cornered against it’s will.
Recommended reading:
How To Learn To Love Saying No In 90 Days (good blog post on actionable steps)
No More Mr Nice Guy (book on how to stop being a passive aggressive loser)
When I Say No I Feel Guilty (book on assertiveness and boundaries)
Boundaries (similar to above)
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It (book how to learn to treat yourself with respect)
2. Become proficient at tolerating rejection and failure.
If you are agreeable (valuing deep intimate relationships and disliking of conflict) or neurotic (strong emotions, self-critical, and self-aware) you will probably never become some kind of Gary Vee who “loves losing”.
But you need to at least be able to tolerate enough rejection and failure that you will not abdicate your long term best interest and responsibilities to existence to avoid them. Whether it’s asking for a raise or quitting your job to start somewhere new that has more opportunity or going out on your own to start your own business or having hard conversations with your toxic family or approaching that cute girl at the coffee shop: if you can’t tolerate rejection or failure, you are fucked.
Approaching women isn’t just about succeeding with women. In the same way that lifting weights isn’t just about getting buff. It’s about cultivating the mental fortitude and the skills of pushing yourself and improving and being able to tolerate doing hard shit that sucks.
A woman intuitively understands that if you’re afraid of her rejecting you, you are terrified of everyone else too. And if you’re so meek and low status that you’re going to let the opinion of some dumb woman or some slave morality losers dictate the direction of your life there is just no way you’re going to be able to do all the hard shit you need to do to become someone who is truly valuable, powerful, and capable of protecting her and her offspring from the dangerous and chaotic world.2
And it’s not even about appeasing women. It’s about appeasing yourself. It’s about earning your own self-respect. If you are ruled by your fears, you will never like yourself. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how good your ideas are or how moral you think you are. It matters what results you get. And despite what mommy or your college professor or your Twitter e-daddy says: the only thing you as a man are owed is death. No one is coming to save you. You must save yourself. And all attempts to sidestep this will only make everything infinitely worse.3
So you need to be able to approach women that you find attractive. And do all the other hard things in your life that are likely to get you rejected. You don’t need to enjoy it—it’s entirely fine if you continue to thoroughly dislike it— but you have to be able to do it. And then you have to engineer your strategy and your mindset in a way that you’ll be successful enough you don’t go home and hang yourself afterwards.
Recommended reading:
Rejection Proof (how to overcome fear of rejection)
The Confidence Gap (how to cultivate confidence in your actions)
Atomic Habits (for creating a system in which you will be motivated and feel like you’re winning)
How To Get Addicted To Doing Things That Are Good For You (good blog post on building productive habits)
3. Learn and practice all the other “alpha stuff” that makes you limbic-ly attractive to a women.
Like I explain in part two, if you want a woman who is the best of both worlds—a woman who will be a good partner and a good mother who will grow you and with you and support your mission but who is also a hot babe you won’t be repulsed to put your dick in—you must yourself become the best of both worlds.
Most men with a strong conscience ignore the importance of being strong, competent, driven, and powerful. As most men with a weak ones ignores the importance of being kind, generous, vulnerable, and forgiving.
If you want a high SMV woman you must become a high SMV man. Meaning you must develop social skills, confidence, fashion sense, hygiene, career competence, physical strength, outcome independence, wealth, power, playfulness, a sense of humor, risk tolerance, and all the rest.
You don’t need to be a god at all these things. You just need to maximize the few you are talented in and do damage control enough on the others so they don’t screw you. And you certainly need to put in conscious effort for at least a year or two to make this happen.
Lastly, and arguably most importantly—as it will be the well from which you derive most of your motivation:
Have a mission you care about and which maximizes your talents and temperament. Find your purpose. It doesn’t matter if it’s something gay like being a writer or a musician or a dancer or something (in fact, a strong man with a “gay” mission is literally the dream archetype for most women). It just needs to be something you love enough to happily spend the rest of your life working towards.
You probably already have an intuition about what you are “for” but refuse to pursue it for fear of failure or social rejection. Cut that shit out and stop wasting the only thing that has any chance of redeeming you from all your flaws.
Recommended reading:
The Rational Male (core text on how women work and what they want)
How To Win Friends And Influence People (title explains it)
How To Talk To Anyone (social skills, small talk)
Mate: Become The Man Women Want (a not-PUA/TRP book on how to be attractive to women)
Never Split The Difference (How to negotiate win wins)
The Mystery Method (very PUA book on how to get laid)
Married Man Sex Life Primer (how to be good at sex)
Starting Strength (weight lifting)
Models (attract women through honesty)
4. Transition from doing these things for women to doing them for you.
Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation:
Most of us will start doing all these things to get laid or to get approval from women. But you have never truly swallowed the Red Pill until you are doing these things for yourself. Because you are the prize. Because you deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. First and foremost by you.
Most people are extrinsically motivated for most things. But extrinsic motivation only lasts as long as the rewards keep coming and continue to escalate in intensity.
If your motivation to “be alpha” or whatever is extrinsic then you will get fat, lazy, poor, and divorce raped as soon as you feel like you’ve won.
Thus the only way to maintain your masculinity and power, and thus attraction and value to a woman, is for your motivation to be intrinsic; for you do these behaviors because you find them rewarding in-and-of-themselves, women’s attraction to you only a cherry on top.
For a long term enjoyable and sustainable life: you must put not only women and money and social success (extrinsic) above your desire for comfort but also your self-worth, self-respect, and life purpose (intrinsic).
Comfort vs Meaning:
Most understand how modern westerners are addicted to low quality, nutrient-deficient diets. But few understand the much more important fact that we are equally addicted to low quality, meaning-deficient work.
And thus, in the same way that to achieve optimal physical health you must fill your meals primarily with nutritionally-dense foods to “get full” and then just adding a little sweet treat on the end:
For optimal mental health you must fill your time primarily with meaning-dense work to “get full” and then just add some well-earned comfort to the end.
Getting all your positive emotion from comfort has the same effect as getting all your calories from candy. You will not only destroy your health, but you will feel miserable and remain in a perpetual state of emptiness and longing while you do it. This is the root negative feedback loop of addiction. And today must be actively countered with intentional effort towards meaning and providing value to the world around you.
If you want to like yourself and enjoy being alive you must earn you comfort—everyday—gaining your dopamine primarily from accomplishment and meaning, not vices and cheap domain tricks.
Your woman as a mirror:
A good woman will be malleable and will always seek to mirror your behavior. And thus her effort in meeting your needs will be a reflection of how well you meet hers; If you stop holding up your end of the bargain, you implicitly tell her she can stop holding up hers.
If you want her to be motivated to remain beautiful, kind, supportive, and whatever else you have explicitly or implicitly communicated you need, you must remain motivated to be wealthy, strong, socially valuable, a leader, etc. And without being intrinsically motivated toward this you will either lose interest or feel obligated and eventually get resentful (or will get constantly shit tested making her an annoying bitch. Women only shit test men who they don’t trust nor feel comfortable with).
It’s okay to use your desire for your woman to stay attracted to you as an occasional extra boost. But it should be something you have made extremely rare before you even begin to consider any commitment and definitely not something that is obvious or shared.
She not only has no problem with your femininity to be dependent on her, she actually seeks it. Her as the vehicle that softens you and makes you kind and loving is a dream come true. But your masculinity dependent on her is repulsive and will make her fearful and untrusting of your abilities.
5. Transition from doing these things for you to doing them for something greater.
It’s great and all to get your needs met, and you definitely cannot become powerful nor be motivated to do anything until you can learn to value yourself and your needs. But being too “selfish” can lead to just as much suffering as being too “selfless”.
Eventually you will need to find something greater than yourself, ideally several, to motivate you to get up and put in effort every day.
Which of these make the most sense for you will be personal but some options include: God, country, family, civilization, the future, humanity as a whole, and your children.
The more you have, the better. Your “purpose” should be tuned to fulfill as many of these as possible.
God (or your country or the universe or whatever) needs you to become what you’re capable of. He put you here for a reason. And I can assure you, it is not to be a lazy cooming blackpiller who works some wage slave jobs he hates and gets his only feelings of power from screeching racial slurs on anon boards, shit posting on Twitter, and playing vidya.
You have never truly swallowed the Burgundy Pill until you are able to factor in and become adept at balancing not only your needs, nor just those close to you, but also that of something much greater and more powerful than you will ever be.
What To Do: Intermediate Edition
No matter what your goals with women are, the previous five things are pretty non-negotiable. After becoming reasonably proficient at these—now that you have at least a nonzero amount of power, self-esteem, and outcome independence and can start dipping your toes into being a chooser rather than a beggar—it’s time to get specific about mapping out your wahmen goals.4
First you must ask the question: what are my female related goals? What are women for and what do I want from them?
This should be pretty easy to deduce, as it’s more or less a spectrum of promiscuity from “date as little as possible to find a woman to marry” to “sleep with as many women as possible”, with something like “casually date a few women while I find what I like and need” and “get a steady stream of sex while I focus on building my SMV” in the middle.
The next—and less obvious but more important—question: is why are they your goals?
Unless you have a bajillion dollars, all your relationships are perfect, and you’ve never procrastinated in your life, it is the case that what you want to do and what you should want to do are not always the same thing. Before diving too deep into acting on your wants it is important to examine why you want them to make sure that you actually like and respect your own motivations and that they aren’t meeting your immediate needs only at the expense of your future.
If you want to get married:
Is it a means to exit the struggle of the dating market so you can be cozy and not have to work on yourself anymore?
Or to not wasting your precious time on pursuing “unimportant frivolities like casual sex” and instead focusing your energy toward building a deep relationship with a high-quality woman?
If the latter, is it because quality time and a deep bond are highly important to you? Or is it just transactional; a means to an end of having progeny and a secretary to help you accomplish your mission?
If you want to date around:
Is it because you love the novelty, fun, and excitement of new women with new sex all the time; the “hunt” and the “game” and the “challenge” bringing you joy and pleasure?
Or because you love the powerful feeling it gives you to have, for the first time in your life, the ability to control the world around you?
Or because you are new to all this and don’t want to make the mistake of committing to anything before you have a better map of the territory; still figuring out what you want, what you can attain, and how to manage women effectively?
Or because you were traumatized by a bad breakup that has left you jaded and afraid to commit for how much damage and destruction it wreaked on your life previously?
Or if you feel completely disinterested in women entirely:
Is it because you truly believe that women cannot provide any value to your life and your mission? That even a loving family who supports and pushes you forward will not help you move more quickly and with more joy?
Or that you just feel like you’ve failed so much and are now so low on the totem pole that the thought of even trying to dig yourself out sounds like so much pain and suffering that you’d rather just scrap the project entirely?
For most of us our answer will be more than one of these, and probably several more I have not thought of. No desire is made of only one single motivation; we contain multitudes.
Our limbic monkey brain seeks sex and power but also comfort and convenience; our higher mind seeks deep connection, purpose, and long term gratification; our fears and trauma and weaknesses seeks to avoid that which has harmed us in the past and escape to somewhere safer. These all work together to determine our preferences and emotions. And parsing them out so we can determine the optimal thing to do is not an easy task.
But just because you won’t sort all this out on your first go does not mean you shouldn’t try. Self awareness is an iterative process that takes years to get through the brunt of. And even then it’s never truly done.
Just do your best. Write it out. Talk it out. Get someone to ask you questions about it. Talk to a friend, start a journal, or a blog, or a video blog, or get a therapist or coach. Whatever makes sense for you. Self awareness and repairing ineffective mental models pays compound interest. And the more you can do sooner, the more you will benefit in the long run.5
The next question is: what is the optimal strategy to meet both your short term and long term goals?
Now that you have at least some idea of what you actually want, and feel at least somewhat confident in the sturdiness of it’s foundations, the next question is how do you actually get it?
Perhaps you want a wife and family but you have never even had a girlfriend. Or perhaps you want to just date lots of women but you have zero social skills. Or perhaps you have a long term girlfriend but you feel she is holding you back rather than a turbocharger strapped to your already powerful engine.
This brings us to…
What To Do: Advanced Edition
With Beginner and Intermediate Edition in mind, it’s time to look at dating strategy and how or whether plate spinning of some form is something you would benefit from incorporating.
First, one must understand the problem with plate spinning is not necessarily plate spinning itself, but a lack of awareness or care for its externalities both personally and societally.
Plate spinning is similar to drugs and alcohol in that you cannot eliminate its harms entirely but if you are intentional and conscious about it you can make them mostly negligible meanwhile deriving significant benefits that cannot be gained anywhere else.
Once you understand that plate spinning is not a viable long term strategy (without causing significant harm to yourself and others), it will probably make sense to do a little plate spinning, or at least something close to it.
A few key reasons for this is:
You cannot have a successful and sustainable LTR with a low quality women, which is all you likely have access to at the moment.
If you are reading this, you are probably very smart and capable, but got screwed in your early life in some way. And that means you are probably pretty low on the totem pole, at least relative to where you know you could and should be.
Thus, most of the women in your social circle or who would see you as comparable in SMV—and thus which are potential candidates for you to date or marry—are similarly low SMV. ie They are probably ugly, lazy, fat, crazy, selfish, or otherwise not a good choice for an LTR.
If you want to marry a high-quality woman you must not only escape the loser underworld you were raised in, and develop all the aforementioned skills necessary to do so, but you must also have lots of experience with women.
Doesn’t matter how rich, handsome, strong, socially skilled, emotionally stable, and competent you are if you don’t know how to actually interact with women. And not just in casual conversation and friendship like they are men, but how to flirt, effectively communicate interest, read cues of interest, escalate intimacy, and all the rest. And there is literally no way to improve these skills without experience.
That’s not to say you can’t gain useful frameworks and background knowledge by reading other men who are experts in this field. You should do this and you honestly probably have to if you’re older than 18 (after high school the number of situations which naturally afford opportunities to develop these skills drop off dramatically). But eventually you must go out and take action on these things if you are ever going to integrate and master them (or at least become sufficiently adept in them).
So unless you plan to marry one of these low quality women around you, and pretty much guarantee you have a shit time, you’re going to need to date. And, unless you plan to put it off for ten years until you fully escape the SMV underclass, you’re going to have to date women who are unlikely to be wife material. And unless you want to risk getting your noob-ass unintentionally stuck in a relationship with one of these low quality women, you’re going to need to be cultivating relationships with more than one woman at a time (ie plate spinning).
Tangent that’s important enough to not be a footnote: If you would rather commit seppuku then casually date low quality women, then really your best option is go monk mode (no FAP + no women) for like a year and use that energy and power to double down on becoming competent, useful, socially mobile, and finding and pursuing of your purpose, etc. so that you can raise your SMV fast enough to come back to solving the woman problem in a few years rather than a few decades.
However, even this strategy is risky, because:
You cannot have a successful and sustainable LTR with a high-quality woman until you have enough experience with women in general to not screw it up.
Seeking to significantly raise your SMV before entering the dating market isn’t necessarily the worst idea, but the best it will do is remove the necessity to date low quality women, not dating entirely.
Relationships are hard. Even the good ones. Even if you could bamboozle a top 10% woman into a relationship with you, you will quickly (within probably months but even years) destroy it if you are not only highly competent and developed in the rest of your life but also highly experienced with women, what they want, and how to deal with them.
Knowing how to properly manage your attention, vulnerability, preferences, criticisms, expectations, quality time, and a dozen other things are stuff you are going to get wrong, likely for years, no matter how much information you consume. 6I have been in at least two dozen relationships with women, five for more than a year; read easily two dozen books on relationships and communication and spent hundreds of hours reading TRP forums; and spent years in therapy largely geared at addressing my relationship difficulties and I still screw up.
So, yes, while you can learn these skills from within a marriage, there is a good reason more than half of people get divorced. And it’s because it’s extremely difficult to not only learn these skills but, more importantly, to make up for the damage you did when you didn’t have them.7
Which brings me to my next point:
You will damage women no matter what you do. And being terrified of doing so will only make it more likely.
Women are not protected through meekness; they are protected through strength and power. Your job is not to protect women from you, your job is to protect them from the chaos and disorder and violence of the external world through your competence, strength, and your own capacity for disagreeableness and masculine power.
As I go into in more detail in Simps, Sex, and The Masculine Revival, women don’t need a house cat to snuggle with they need an aggressive lion they can tame just enough to not get killed themselves. Sure, the world isn’t quite the African Savannah anymore, but that is mostly only because we have outsourced male-violence-as-a-means-of-maintaining-social-order to the state, not because masculine force is no longer necessary.
It is masculinity’s job to exploit the environment (most often non-human things like food, tools, buildings, etc but occasionally human outgroups also) for power and resources. It is femininity’s job to gain those resources and power from men and distribute them within the tribe. This is why the greatest measured difference between men and women is men’s “interest in things” vs women’s “interest in people”. And why men are more temperamentally geared toward competition, dominance, and aggression while women are more geared toward cooperation, kindness, and compassion.
Because nature is a ruthless bitch and the enemy tribes sees you as “environment”. Without competition, aggression, and dominance first defending the perimeter of the castle walls to keep out the barbarian hordes —or even going out themselves to kill the barbarians and take their shit—then cooperation, kindness, and compassion are impossible.
However, that doesn’t mean she wants to watch you throw a spear through the intruder’s skull or skin the rabbit or beat the criminal up and throw him over the castle wall. She just wants to live in her fantasy world where there is order, food on the table, and she can go on a nice evening walk without fear of getting mugged or raped. And If you leave her to her nature, she will actually avoid seeing this. She wants to be oblivious to how it is done. And if she ever is forced to confront it, she will try to stop it (ex women becoming vegan, anti-bullying, pro-immigration, all the other PC lib stuff you see from women).
And this is how it should be. Because masculinity and femininity are largely mutually exclusive. The more exposed she is to the dangerous, violent, and gruesome nature of reality, the less she can maintain the gentleness, innocence, kindness, and beauty that are the reason you value her in the first place.
The more chaos and disorder you expose her to, the less feminine she can be.
The rise of feminism and “soy boys” is simply the dissolution of the division of labor between the genders—where, to best serve the globalist regime of late stage mercantilism, the genders are driven to become replaceable, interchangeable generalists rather than maximizing their strengths. And when men stop being masculine, it gives women no choice but to take up the mantle. And masculine women make terrible wives and mothers.
Point is:
Any woman worth marrying will always see cooperation and kindness and compassion as the optimal solution to any problem. And this is dependent on the order created by men whose default is the opposite. So when you choose what you should often choose for your and her best interest—that of competition, power, and dominance—you are occasionally if not often going to upset her or at least make her uncomfortable.
It is women’s job to try and maintain their short term comfort exactly because the big bad world is always threatening it. Women are built to fight for their short term comfort because nature is always trying to rip it from them. But they not only don’t expect this need to get met all the time, they don’t want this need to get met all the time. Like I explain in Beginner Edition Point number 5: It is not the attainment of comfort that we want, it is the fight for it. And thus women are relying on you to be the balancing force for their comfort seeking; to go out into the chaos and often even drag them with you; to disrupt her short term comfort in the best interest of your and her long term security and stability.
And thus if you are going to keep your claws, fangs, and the sack of testosterone factories between your legs that will protect her in the long run, it is impossible to avoid not harming and upsetting her—possibly often—in the short run.8
With that said: the collateral damage unintentionally done to women through masculinity can be greatly mitigated by having your life mission and goals with women set out before hand. Because knowing how much upset you can “spend" and what the top priorities it should be “spent” toward, allows you to gain the highest ROI for each unit of cozy-disruption.
Women Are Like Spending Money
Upsetting women is like spending money. (And your goals are like your budget).
Are you spending money on frivolous short-term pleasure—typical TRP and plate spinning which cares nothing for the damage it is doing?
Or are you investing that money into your future—telling women no or hurting their feelings when failure to do so will harm you or them or the world more in the future?
Or are you just hoarding all your money for fear of spending it on the wrong things, avoiding the hard decision now which will only leave you poor and zeroed out in the end—being a placating beta who avoids ever being disapproved of by women?
Your money is inflating away at 10% a year bro. You can’t avoid spending. You can only hope to find intelligent investment vehicles that result in net positives in the long run. 9
You will hurt women. Just like you will spend money. And sometimes your “investments” will go belly up (you will do something hard that upsets her and it won’t end up paying off later), and other times what you thought was frivolous spending was actually an important investment you were just too dumb or too afraid to take (you will be too gentle and it will lead to long term negatives for her, you, or the relationship).
You will never get this perfect. But it is better to err in the side of overspending than underspending. Women are tougher and more ruthless than you think. And if you won’t be a lion willing to get his paws bloody to protect her, there are plenty of men who will.
If you are agreeable (which you probably are if you are still reading after Conscience Edition) you will naturally err on the side of minimizing harm in the short term and abscond thinking about whether this is a good move over the long term. And this is the most dangerous possible scenario for an LTR, as it means the problems will be hidden for years and are unlikely to show up until it’s too late (eg after marriage or kids).10
So ask yourself, what is better for the world:
You failing at women entirely and dying alone / getting divorce raped because you were too “moral” to crack a few plates?
Or you going out there and learning as much as you can as effectively as you can so that you can become strong and then find a woman to marry whose life will be infinitely better with you in it, and who will double the rate at which you can enact your life mission that ultimately improve the lives of thousands, millions, or even billions of people?
I think my position on the correct choice is clear.
With all that said, we can now return to the question of whether you should date low quality women now or wait to date until you have access to higher quality options.
Dating Is Like Driving
I see the question akin to a teenager getting his first car asking “should I buy a cheap used car now or wait until I have more money to buy a brand new high quality car later?”
If you are reasonably self aware, you know that you will probably treat your first car poorly and get in a few fender benders and will fail to take care of it because you are lazy or just didn’t even know you had to do some specific maintenance thing.
And thus does it really make sense to wait five years to drive, and deal with all the limitations that not having a car puts on your life, just so you can get a brand new expensive one that you’ll make the same mistakes with anyway?
That doesn’t mean just pick any car. Some cars aren’t even drivable or have disgusting interiors from terrible previous owner or will cost far more than they are worth. But there are also plenty of cheap, reasonably well kept, used options that can get you from point A to point B while you “save up” for a better option. And if you “refuse” to drive one because “it is disgusting” or something it is almost certainly a manifestation of a fragile ego and a narcissistic view that you are much more “deserving” than you are, rather than some kind of actual rational and objective calculation.
With that said, women are not cars. They are people. Or at least sentient self driving cars that you must care enough for so they don’t decide to turn on the humans and go on a rampage of vehicular manslaughter.
So the question then becomes: how do you mitigate damage as much as possible to women you date?
What To Do: Advanced Edition For Real
Okay so now 6,000 words into this post and 16,000 into this series, we can finally address the strategy that started this whole thing. I hope you haven’t been holding your breath, expecting some brilliant new solution that changes the game entirely. Because, just like the rest of The Burgundy Pill, it’s more evolution than revolution. Or maybe even just a big heaping serving of “expansion in understanding”; only taking the old maps and making them fantastically detailed.
There are two main reasons most men cause damage to women they date A) they are oblivious to or just don’t care that they are harming women in their quest for sexual access or B) they care too much about harming women that they won’t make the hard decision necessary to protect them in the long run.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series sought to address the former reason. This piece has largely been about addressing the latter.
In regards to how to modify plate spinning to more properly balance one’s level of “harm reduction”:
Break plates hard and fast. The lower a height you drop them from, the less damage you’ll do.
Dudes new to TRP, usually former nice guys, are so concerned about harm reduction11 that they let relationships drag on for way longer than they should or try to “set her down gently”, both of which actually cause more harm to everyone involved.
You can’t set a woman down gently. All you can do is confuse her. What may actually be a lack of interest on your part, she will perceive as “he is high value and I must dedicate even more time, emotion, and energy to locking him down”. And the longer you carry on the relationship, the more invested both of you will get. So unless you plan on marrying her, dump her as soon as you feel confident she isn’t wife material.
To analogize: you can’t change the force of gravity (the shock and pain of getting dumped), but you can change the height from which you drop her (how long you let the relationship go on). The longer you wait, the more damage you cause.
Do not let the path of least resistance dictate your dating decisions
Stop being scared of hurting women.
Women are tougher than you think (per part three: they have been getting raped for hundreds of thousands of years after all). And the concerns you have now about her viability as more-than-a-plate will only amplify over time and eventually destabilize the relationship. It’s infinitely better for everyone involved if you next her now, rather than in a year (or god forbid, after you’ve gotten married or had children).
Stop being scared of going back on another dry spell.
You are more attractive than you think. And more capable. And as soon as you can ditch the scarcity mindset that causes you to cling to women who are poor fits, you will quickly find that there are dozens of women who would be interested in you. And let’s even say this weren’t true: if you are actually the unattractive loser you think you are then she was going to dump you anyway. Because women only want men who other women are attracted to. So regardless of how many women you can get, the correct solution is to immediately dump women you have any concerns that you may never love.
Stop trying to mental gymnastics yourself into “is she or isn’t she good enough to upgrade”.
If you have any doubts that she is wife material, she isn’t wife material. Any ruminating about this is just your scarcity mindset rearing it’s head. Ask yourself “If she would be relieved if I dumped her and I knew I could get a woman better by next week, what would I do?” If this doesn’t make you go “oh fuck this one is great and I should figure out how to make it work” then you should dump her. Now.
Worst case scenario, you date a few other women and find they all suck and realize you made a mistake. If she actually was really into you, she will still be around. If not, oh well, there are dozens more.
The true reason I wrote this entire series
The other major tweak the Burgundy Pill makes on traditional plate spinning is against the recommendation to try and “win” the “what are we?” conversations.
Dark Triad men like the traditional Plate Spinning recommendation of obfuscating, deflecting, and assuaging women when they invoke these conversations because they don’t care if they are causing damage to others, only that they are maximizing pleasure for themselves.
Nice Guys however like the traditional Plate Spinning recommendation because it allows them to avoid conflict and feeling like bad people.
Obfuscating the truth that you don’t want to upgrade her allows you to avoid the reality that you are being a pussy and kick the can down the road of the messy break up. This is weak gay beta shit and you will regret it in the long term.
I dated plenty of women for way longer than I should have who I knew from the start were not women I would ever upgrade, and watched as they slowly descend into madness at the incongruity between my words and my actions. Classic TRP let me believe that this was the “masculine” thing to do, and that it’s their problem when they inevitably explode.
But It’s one thing to harm women because you just don’t give a shit. It’s totally another because you are lying to yourself. The former can usually get away with it. The latter never can.
And I am a perfect example. I am—years later—still haunted by the regret and shame of my actions. Not like actively or anything but whenever I think about it, it makes me feel ashamed and regretful. It doesn’t matter whether someone else would have done it or whether they were already highly damaged or whether they made it so easy it’s like they were practically begging for it. It mattered that I, someone who sought deeply to leave the world better than I had found it, was going against all of my values and causing harm because I was a pussy.
Only literal psychopaths and weak scarcity mindset losers continue to plate women they long ago decided will never be upgraded.
Looking back now, it is clear that the motivation for writing this series was largely an attempt at redemption; to try and help other men avoid the mistakes that I made which still haunt me to this day. My hope that perhaps If I can say enough useful shit to get at least a few dozen, ideally a few hundred or a thousand, men to better manage the modern sexual anarchy, maybe I can redeem myself for at least some of the damage I have done through my own ignorance and cowardice.
So all that to say:
Never lie. Never obfuscate. Most importantly to yourself.
This doesn’t mean tell every woman you date on the first date your entire strategy and plans and upgrade path. That is autistic as fuck. Have some tact and charisma. But it does mean that at least by the time the “what are we” conversations come up, you should be completely honest and deflect nothing. And depending on the situation, it will probably make sense to say “I’m not looking for anything serious right now” or whatever is the truth, much sooner that this. Trust your intuition, it is always right.
You are pretty much guaranteed to “break” the plate when this happens—meaning no more relationship, no more sex, and back on the look out for someone new—and that is just something you have to live with.
And this is why you must always be cultivating (or at least maintaining) your abilities to cold approach women and at bare minimum remain actively talking to (if not dating) multiple prospects at any point in time until you’ve found one worth marrying.
I won’t pretend this isn’t plate spinning on hard mode. But I can tell you, every time I’ve made the hard decision up front in my life—and I have done this a lot—I have always been glad for it in the long run.
Those with the lowest time preference always win in the end. And being honest and having it break plates is infinitely better than battling with your addiction to cheap sex vs your conscience (if you’re dark triad) or your cowardice vs your self esteem (if you’re agreeable).
Conclusion
I could probably go into a lot more detail on these, but I was over this series 8 weeks ago, and I think these capture enough of the essence for you to get the picture.
Date, cold approach, plate spin, etc per standard methodology but:
Dump poor fits sooner.
Don’t lie.
Do these two things and you mitigate 90% of the damage you would otherwise cause by plate spinning.
And really it’s just “Don’t lie”. The former just being “don’t lie to yourself” and the latter being “don’t lie to her”.
Lying is for losers and high time preference retards. It is often easy but it is rarely worth it. You will still do it, at least sometimes and for some things, but the less you do it, the better your life and the world will be.
Speak the truth. As best you can and as often as you can.
Pursue the truth. As best you can and as often as you can.
This will almost always be the hardest path. But will also be the simplest. And, most importantly, the one you, looking back ten years from now will have wished you’d chose everytime.
When everyone else’s high time preference decisions start catching up to them in their thirties and forties, and their lives begin to crumble, you, having spent a decade or two building a rock solid foundation, will begin your exponential rise.
And while they are dealing with crumbling marriages, obesity, kids that hate them, financial woes, and fat bitchy wives; the biggest problem you’ll have is that you can’t relate to the losers and that everyone will say you got lucky.
Being on the other side of this I can say without question: Trust me. This trade off is absolutely worth it.
That’s all for now.
Pls like post if you got value from it so other people will be more inclined to read it and maybe get similar value thx
This is not the natural state of agreeable men. It is a byproduct of being raised in a de-masculinized matriarchy which teaches them that kindness, compassion, and social harmony are the means by which you achieve power, as it is for women, rather than the means toward which you exert violence, aggression, and competition to protect.
Men most do not understand why women have the preferences they do because no one actually believes in evolution, just pays lip service to it. When you start asking the question “why, ten thousand years ago, might this behavior have been so critical to survival that it is today hardcoded into us?” everything about human behavior begins to make infinitely more sense. Women “shit test” and want “strong men” and “bad boys” and all this other stuff because when she was a baby-oven on the African savannah and had no choice but to have ten kids—the situation which all of her biological programming was coded for—a weak man who was in charge of protecting her only ended up getting her and her offspring killed. The women with the expectations of modern women for strength, power, resources, etc were the only women who actually survived through to modern times.
Only exception having to save yourself is to become religious. If you can’t manage a master morality, then a slave morality to pro-social ends (eg religion) is the only way you will ever do more good than harm. Problem here is that there is not currently any religion that has been “updated” to account for the modern world, and thus it is near impossible to succeed today relying only on religious wisdom alone.
It may make sense to do much of this phase before Beginner Edition. Particularly if you can’t muster any motivation to do the hard work of phase one. You need a why before you will voluntarily suffer. If neither yourself, God (higher ideal), nor the general idea of woman is a strong enough “why”, then getting specific about your woman goals may help.
I spent easily 5-figures of my own money on therapy in my mid-twenties and, as someone who is highly neurotic, I can without question say it paid itself back ten fold already and was easily the best investment I’ve ever made (outside of maybe Bitcoin). If you are low in neuroticism and don’t think it will benefit you, then that’s one thing, but if you just think “you cant afford it” the truth is that you actually can’t afford not to do it. Take half the money you spend on stupid instant gratification bullshit and put it toward investing it in optimizing your brain.
I will eventually write a “The Burgundy Pills Guide To LTRs”. If you want to increase its priority level, bug me about it.
I can already hear you retorting “No one needed to do all this fifty years ago! Why do I have to do it?” I address this in the next section, Advanced Considerations.
If you spend a decade becoming an expert communicator and negotiator you can likely get her to do things that she would otherwise be upset by but feel supported and like she got a fair shake in the decision, but you certainly aren’t going to get this less of compliance at first unless you are abdicating long term outcomes.
Buy Bitcoin ;)
The generally accepted balance is “if she never calls you an asshole, you’re too nice. If she is always calling you an asshole, you’re too mean”
Most nice guys actually aren’t that into “harm reduction” or at least it’s not why they are “nice guys”. What they really want is approval and to be told they are a good boy because they think if they never upset mommy then mommy will finally love them for who they are. Objectively, the most harm-reducing thing you can do is be a bit of an asshole who does the hard and often hurtful things in the short term that lead to better results in the long term. “nice guy”ism is just childhood trauma and dysfunction and weakness masquerading as “being a good person”.
Great stuff man. I stumbled across your blog the other day when I got a wild hair to read the comments on another blog (why did I do that? I never do that) and saw the comment you left on this (https://eggreport.substack.com/p/i-want-you-to-live-a-beautiful-life/comments) post. Shortly, I've never found something so serendipitously that was so well-tuned to what I needed to hear exactly when I needed it. You're making a real difference and I wish you all the best.
Can’t believe I wasn’t subbed 🤦🏻♂️
Nailed it. The kind of thing I wish I’d read in my 20s - but instead had to work out the hard way 😂
Seems I have some catch up reading to do!
Adding your stack to my recommended list also. The next gen of young men need this.
🤝